Original subtitles

From 1989 to 2001, there were almost no legitimate winners in the McDonald's

Monopoly game.

I mean, how crazy bullshit is that?

McDonald's makes French fries and apple pies.

They don't make marketing.

Simon Marketing actually produced and came up with a Monopoly game.

The FBI told us the game pieces are being stolen.

And the person who's controlling this is Uncle Jerry.

We had this one shot.

I wanted to burn down the criminal enterprise.

We were on the wiretaps to find out the depths of this scheme.

We did an analysis of past winners' phone records. All these phone calls

Jerome Jacobson, also known as Jerry Jacobson, head of security for Simon

Marketing.

Hey, here's a man who looks like he has something to say.

Are we all set, Ronnie?

Hey, careful.

Looks like you've got flubber shoes on, too, today.

A wonderful, anonymous donor mailed

a Monopoly game piece.

And right here in the middle of it was a little winning ticket of one

million dollars.

Somebody won a $1 million Monopoly game at McDonald's, and God bless them,

decided to send that money to the children of St. Jude.

Well, this is a great day.

We at McDonald's have a game going, which a person won a game piece in Texas

mailed it to St. Jude's anonymously, and McDonald's worked out a way to pay the

game piece, even though it really can't be transferred.

It's just a wonderful Christmas story that someone would give.

That way, anonymously, not won any recognition for the children at St.

The McDonald's Monopoly game went back to 1987, and so we

didn't know how long the contest was fixed.

St. Jude's was listed as a winner, which was certainly an anomaly.

We didn't know if this was part of this conspiracy.

We didn't know how Jerry Jacobson was involved in this fraud scheme.

Of course, he was Uncle Jerry.

I mean, at first you just think it's an alias name, but at least it was at least

half of the name.

Hey, help me, Fred, will you? Oh, this is heavy.

Odds of finding the winning piece were one in more than 206 million.

Odds of someone giving it away, heaven only knows.

My name is Marvin Braun. I live in Miami, Florida.

Jerry Jacobson is my stepbrother. Yes, he is my stepbrother.

And did that make you close? Yeah, I mean, we grew up as, I don't think

-brothers, but we grew up close.

We're only a week apart in age.

His dream of life was always becoming an FBI agent.

It never worked out. But it's funny. It's a funny story.

If you said to me to describe this story, I would say, don't believe it,

it's true.

Don't believe it.

It's just weird. It's just weird how it happened.

He had discussed about the gang pieces one time.

I think it was 1989, and we had discussed.

How, you know, he would be able to possibly get a $25 ,000 game piece and,

you know, if we could do something with it, you know, whatever.

A month later, six weeks later, I don't remember, he showed up with a piece.

And he says, cash it in.

There was an 800 number.

to uh call which i did and they gave me instructions i went to the post office i

registered it whatever the words are at the post office and everything else and

i sent it in i think i was the first person

to turn the ticket in he knew i knew i um i'd keep my mouth shut i

guess that's the right way of saying it he trusted me with it yeah did he tell

you how he did it No.

No.

So we were looking into Simon Marketing's Jerry Jacobson.

Once we got the Title III surveillance listening to phone call.

We had him on the wire all day, all night.

So we had thought, hey, this may be the main guy. So then we started focusing

more on trying to figure out who he was.

After really digging into this Jerome Jacobson background, we discovered,

other things, that he had been a police officer in Hollywood, Florida.

To become a police officer, you have to be a level -headed individual.

Honesty and trustworthiness is paramount.

Jerry Jacobson was a patrolman, and he came to me in the parking lot one

morning. At that time, I was investigating the death of a newborn

We had no leads at all.

And Jerry told me that he had some psychic friends.

that read about the case and that they were willing to assist.

My reaction was I was grateful, and I did take him up on the offer.

I don't know that there's anything wrong having psychics as friends.

I thought that was pretty wonderful.

I met Jerry at Hollywood Police Department.

We both were on the same squad, and we started about the same time.

And one day he showed up at my front door to inform me that my boyfriend was

cheating on me.

So that's how I met Jerry.

We dated off and on, and there were some

good times and some bad times, but we got married in Tennessee.

I think it was 81.

And Jerry became my stepfather to my son.

This

big,

long silence isn't going to be in there, is it?

One day, he started to shave, and he couldn't reach all the way up to shave.

It was difficult, and it was getting more difficult every time he tried to

By noon, he couldn't lift his arms.

He couldn't lift his arms, period.

So I took him to the hospital, and they ran the test for multiple

sclerosis.

Guillain -Barre and a couple of other things, and he had the Guillain -Barre.

He says he's got MS, but technically it was

Guillain -Barre, and I took leave from my work and spent time at the hospital

with him because his mother was going to put him in a nursing home.

I gave him 15 minutes a day to feel sorry for himself.

And after that 15 minutes, we're going to work.

Because I felt like if we kept working, maybe we could stay ahead of the

paralysis.

So I fed him and gave him showers and walked him up and down the hall and all

that stuff.

After six or eight months, he finally turned around before it got to it.

respiratory system it was getting there but it didn't quite take over so and

then the next day after the next couple of days it stabilized and then started

turning around a little bit there's always a question why somebody leaves

a law enforcement career early many times there's a good reason but but

always a question it's not typical

And in his case, we learned that he had a health condition or an accident that

had him go out, I guess, on a disability.

He moved to Atlanta because there was a doctor in Atlanta or a hospital that

dealt with nothing but MS.

I think the MS really proved his life completely because I think he always

wanted to be in law enforcement and having the MS completely changed his

We moved to Atlanta together.

I got a job shortly after we came here in security.

He started getting better.

And at that point, he wanted to go back to work.

Simon Marketing offered him a job working security for the Monopoly

We, as the FBI, could not and logically would not march into Simon

Marketing and start asking questions about Jerry and that process.

Generally, when the FBI starts asking questions, people get a little spun up

wonder really why.

We were working hand -in -hand with McDonald's, just trying to figure out

how much.

They knew about Simon Marketing.

Surprisingly, McDonald's didn't know much about the process that Simon

went through with their promotional games.

I wasn't familiar with Simon Marketing at all until the investigation began.

After that meeting with the FBI, I realized that I needed to learn a little

more about Simon Marketing and the promotion, so I set up a meeting with

Marketing under the guise of...

trying to learn how the security procedures were in place?

We were able to enlist McDonald's to do these inquiries on our behalf, but I

think also on their behalf, too.

Did you tell them at that point that Jerome Jenkinson was a person of

Yeah, yeah, no, we would have not told McDonald's, because if we're wrong,

sullied somebody's reputation for no good reason.

I don't know how much he was making at Simon.

His wife was working.

I don't know if he needed the money.

No, I think he said he has a contact to get them or something.

I think it was contact.

It was not him. It was not him.

It was not him.

Someone else?

He gave me the idea it was not him stealing the tickets, that he had to

Hal to get the tickets.

I was under the impression Jerry was a security for it. In other words, that

another person was taking the tickets or whatever. I wasn't sure. I thought

Jerry was security.

When I met with Simon Marketing, we went through the security procedures and the

procedures at the printing press. They actually had a very thorough and

comprehensive operation for ensuring the security and integrity of our game

pieces. So I was very pleased with what I saw.

McDonald's reports that at the facility there was incredibly secure and that

this idea that...

things are loose or that they could walk right out of there was almost

impossible, highly, highly, highly unlikely.

The obvious question was how this whole process worked, how were game pieces

printed, distributed.

Simon Marketing had these game pieces made just north of Atlanta by

a secure printing business.

My name is Jack Sisk. I actually was working in security at Dittler for

15 years, actually.

My name is Perry Pelock, and I was the bindery supervisor.

My name is Doyle Grant, and I was the shipping clerk.

My name is Gilbin Peoples, and I was the parts clerk in the maintenance

department.

Dittler Brothers Printing was a very secure printing company, and that's how

got into the lottery business and into scratch -off.

And I think that's one of the reasons that we got the U .S. postage stamp job

because the federal government said, hey, this place is really secure because

got that and it went real well.

And then it grew from there, you know, three or four years and McDonald's,

millions and millions of dollars to pay to print all this stuff.

I was the director of security for Dittler Brothers between 1987 and 2000.

And I worked with Jerry when they were running Monopoly.

because Simon and Dittler were real close.

We had people in Dittler Brothers 24 hours.

The Dittler Brothers facility was very secure.

You had to go through a guard shack to get into the facility. You had to sign

when you got into the facility.

Then you had to go through another guard to get into the room where the state

lotteries were being produced along with our game pieces.

When Monopoly was running, it would just about take everything in the plant

running. It would get so big.

That was our large customer by a long shot.

You're talking hundreds of millions of game pieces, you know.

When we did press runs of winners, we pretty much surrounded the press.

They had alarm systems. They had cameras. The gate was opened, and it

Alarm would go off.

We had a big ball when we had winners in.

There were two locks.

It's almost like, you know, back in the Cold War, you'd have two people in a

missile silo, and it takes two.

Jerry was in there for Simon to make sure that Dittler brothers were doing

jobs. Jerry would stand behind and look over their shoulder and get their

combination.

Then he would raise, holy hell, because we allowed him to do that.

All the game pieces that were produced by Dittler Brothers were loaded on

trucks. Security would actually physically lock the back of the truck.

Once that truck left, we normally would get on an airplane, fly to that city,

and meet the truck the next morning to unlock it, break the seal, verify what

was loaded.

My name is Brian Littrell. I work security, flash quality control for the

that McDonald's usually ran.

We would bring the labels out, free drinks, free fries, and the two pieces

assemble together, the label on top of the cup.

The higher -level winners was done by a completely different, more secure

process. I would usually get a call saying that Jerry was going to be coming

with an independent auditor.

Dittler security has to be there.

Simon has to be there, the auditor has to be there, and the customer service

has to be there.

And they all witnessed the winner run.

The auditor would unlock the suitcase. There was an envelope inside with

signatures across the seal to make sure that it was still the same contents as

to when it was packaged. And inside there, there would be a certain number

seeds. This is what a seed would look like, one of which was a high -level

winner, the rest were common.

And then I would insert them in various production lines.

No one knew, and no one was supposed to know, where the high -level winner was.

You go into the McDonald's, you open up the game piece, and maybe you're an

instant million -dollar winner.

I won!

And so when these game pieces got to the Simon Marketing Redemption Center and

it goes through the process of, do we have a real winner?

They literally would be opened by a person with gloves. These are all being

recorded.

And there would always be an error made in the winning game piece. Say, on one

corner, there's a little chip out of the word.

We also write on the Million Dollar Winner a little code on there with a

light pen.

You can't see.

So if you show up with a piece that doesn't have the code on it, you're

get caught real soon.

We were always a little bit overboard.

But, yeah, we protected McDonald's, and I think that's a major reason they used

us. And, of course, Jerry was in there sort of telling them how it needed to be

built.

How would you describe Jerry when you were working with him?

Everybody liked Jerry. I mean, everybody in the office liked Jerry.

He wasn't real flashy.

We always had Thanksgiving. Everybody sort of brought in a potluck at

Thanksgiving. And Jerry always brought in ribs.

And his ribs were delicious.

They would just fall off the bone.

Yes, everybody looked forward to his ribs.

He didn't seem to be big -headed at all.

And he was always very generous. If he made ribs for himself, he would make

for the whole office.

Jerry was a generous fellow.

We got divorced, and even when he was married again and I needed something, he

would be right there.

There's nothing stingy about him at all.

After we got divorced, it was like...

Even though he was the head of security for Simon, he still worked under my

guidelines and Dittler Brothers.

I told him if he stole anything, I'd kill him.

When you got your check, what was it like?

Exciting. Well, I'm not going to lie, it was exciting and everything else. And,

you know, I deposited it and we split it.

Down the road, he came to me and he said that he could do bigger pieces.

I had not cashed in anything but a $25 ,000 ticket, and I didn't want any parts

of them.

At that time...

I was going to New York like every Tuesday morning and coming home every

Wednesday night. I was buying maternity clothes in New York for my maternity

shop.

So I approached two people who were manufacturers in New York that I dealt

for many, many, many years. And I approached them if they would be

possibly doing a deal with Jerry.

Who were those two people? I'd rather not mention names.

No, I'm pretty sure. Well, maybe his nieces and nephews.

No, I'd never heard anybody refer to him as Uncle Jerry.

For a while, the question was, well, who is Uncle Jerry?

Oh, well, there's a Jerry Jacobson working at Simon.

That must be Uncle Jerry.

But there was always this inference maybe that Uncle Jerry was somehow

to organized crime, Italian organized crime, because the uncle connotation

this kind of almost like a godfather -ish sort of moniker.

Then we found out that there was another Jerry involved in this named

Jerry Columbo.

People everywhere are winning big, playing the Monopoly game at McDonald's.

Jerry Colombo won a Dodge Viper, and there are two $1 million prizes left.

My name is Frank Colombo. I am brother of Jerry, Gennaro Colombo. And I'm

Heather Colombo, and I am Frank Colombo's wife.

I really wanted him to keep the car.

You know, I was, you know, a young guy. I'm like, hey, a Dodge Viper, I mean,

pretty damn cool. Can I borrow it?

But it was too small. I mean, he was a big guy.

But it was kind of funny because all of my friends would call me, hey, your

brother won the car.

Oh, my God. And I'm sitting there laughing in the back of my head going,

okay, he won the car, sure.

It was just amusing that people believed it.

It worked.

I'm Robin Colombo.

My husband is Jerry Colombo, Genaro Colombo.

He was part of the Colombo crime family.

That commercial, that almost cost him his life because he wasn't supposed to

a commercial.

And what was Jerry thinking to be in an actual national TV commercial?

Because he's a ham.

He was even going to be in a movie with Jackie Chan, as a matter of fact.

I said, what?

That doesn't even sound right.

You, a big -ass Sicilian, and a China man, and a Western.

I said, oh, my God.

And it was that same noon, night, whatever it is.

It was that.

Mom!

Come get this dog out of here.

The Sicilian culture,

of course, it's family first, no matter what.

But when I met her, I didn't want her to know my last name because I want her to

know me and not my family.

As a matter of fact, for the first three to four months, I didn't even know his

name. He would go by a completely different name and only did I.

I see a bracelet on his wrist one day, and I questioned him on the name that

said Frank C, when this is entirely different from the name that he gave me.

Yes, I went by Tony Iannotti.

I kind of keep that in the background. You know, not too many people know who

family is until now.

Five families have run New York's Italian -American Mafia. The names are

familiar. Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, and Columbo.

Police in Brooklyn pulled a man's body out of the water duct taped inside a

tarp. Police say someone also tied a cinder block to the victim's ankle.

My name is Joe Colombo. I should be treated the same as anybody else.

Joe Colombo, real estate broker, mafia boss, and one of the biggest con men in

the history of organized crime.

What was your reaction when you learned that the shooting had occurred at the

Colombo's? I just heard, like, shots, about eight shots, and I didn't think

were shots. I thought they were firecrackers. His high profile caused

bosses to okay his murder, the man some called an underworld boss.

My brother wasn't the normal, you know, when you watch The Sopranos, you know,

and he's the guy's talking to him, you know, all about, hey, forget about it,

and all this kind of nonsense.

Forget about it. Forget about it. Now forget about it.

Forget about it.

That's the movies.

Now, did he do things like that?

Absolutely.

But he did it with humor.

More like, I guess if you got Marlon Brando and Joe Pesci and put them

you'd probably end up with my brother.

You know?

That's pretty much it.

Now that I think about this, if you got Al Capone and Rodney Dangerfield and

mashed them together, You got my brother.

I think that's a good analogy.

The first time I met Jerry, we looked at each other, and it was like the

chemistry between us was crazy.

Like, you know, cartoon, you know, everything's like boom, boom.

I was having a long -distance relationship with a federal agent.

who was not that fun.

And Jury was fun, so I chose him.

My father was military and strict, very strict.

So, yeah, they didn't go so well, but thank you.

I rebelled.

We were married in Panama City, Florida.

It wasn't as extravagant as you would think because I was pregnant.

So no Catholic wedding.

My brother Jerry had his hand in a lot of different avenues.

He had some bookying things that he was doing with bookies and what have you.

He was in charge of security at the Taj Mahal for a few years.

That was the old Trump Taj Mahal.

He would gamble, and he would win a lot. I don't know if that was rigged as

well, possibly.

Everything's rigged in life. Nothing anymore. Yeah.

He was always looking at a way to make some good, easy money.

You know we had the little gray M &M as well.

Did you know that?

Okay, I smoke a half a door in a night. I need to relax.

I need to put on something funny.

And just let me chill.

Well, when I would wake up in the middle of the night, I had to have something

sweet. So I had Reese's Cups down in the kitchen, right?

So he had to let me know there was a gray M &M wrapped in aluminum foil.

And he told me, don't touch it.

The rules say if you find a gray imposter M &M's, the winning bag could

$1 million.

And then...

He says, you're also going to win a publisher's clearinghouse.

When they come to your door, knock.

You have won a million dollars from publisher's clearinghouse. I can't

it. This is the truth.

Real people really win the publisher's clearinghouse sweepstakes.

They're probably going to say, ah, bullshit, you know, all that. But I'm

telling you what my husband told me.

Jerry wanted something big.

He kept threatening, you know, I'm going to work for my uncles up in New York.

You know, I'm like.

Well, you know what? I think it's time.

You know, you can spend too much time with somebody, and you don't play golf.

And, I mean, the only golf club he had was about this big, and that was, well.

So he went up north, and he got with Uncle Dominic, who was the godfather.

So Uncle Dominic, was he an actual? No, they call that out of respect.

He wasn't an actual uncle.

But he loved my husband because my husband was old school, full -blooded

Sicilian.

He was hooking him up with everything.

My name's Jennifer Etheridge.

Robin Colombo is my mother.

Jerry Colombo is my stepfather.

You couldn't help not to like him. And especially with, you know, his...

career that he was into um it was definitely intriguing at the time you

would show me duffel bags of money and whip it out here you go go buy you

something nice you know and then i'd say when i was about 15 16 years old that's

when jerry got into the monopoly thing and then that definitely you know it was

that was a big deal he had promised me um a million dollar ticket whenever i

turned 18.

because nobody could have the same last name. And since my last name was

Etheridge, you know, I was going to be able to win a million -dollar ticket.

I was like, oh, heck yeah, absolutely.

Your brother, how did he get introduced to this whole situation?

With the Monopoly situation, Uncle Dominic worked for family members in the

York division and a mutual friend of his.

kind of said hey i got this guy that's doing this and this might be interested

and so forth and so on and uh that was jerome from simon marketing uh

he was getting the tickets do you think that uncle

dominic has found jerry jacobson like that this was something that uncle

dominic initiated i don't know it could have been i think

Jerome possibly started it on his own in the beginning, and then people got wind

of what he was doing, and then they said, hey, let's see if we can use this

an avenue to expand it.

And I believe that was brought to my brother's attention, like, hey, there's

this guy, he's doing this, and let's see if we can expand the horizon.

But then Jerry, my Jerry, received a phone call that Uncle Dominic died.

How did that happen?

You know, you don't really talk about that.

So anyway, my Jerry and Jerry Jacobson became partners on the

monopoly team.

To Jerry.

Working any case is like a big puzzle. You start with a little piece.

And you've got to try to vet whether that is legitimate, whether it has any

merit to it. The undercover portion with Michael Hoover went beyond

expectations.

We had Michael Hoover calling A .J. Glum.

We suspected Glum was a recruiter, and he probably didn't just recruit Hoover.

Is there a connection to Uncle Jerry?

And so we started looking into him and then expanded into other phone lines.

We had coverage on many lines, including Jerry Jacobson, A .J. Glum, and a

number of the winners.

The spider web of all, like, we didn't know how big this was. We had this Uncle

Jerry. Everything was very general, nebulous.

So inside the wire room, people sitting there getting ready to listen, and

nothing happens.

You put all this effort into it, and nothing happens.

You're spending your weekend doing that.

Unfortunately, in these conversations on the wire, the winners mostly had

innocuous conversations that have nothing to do with the crime.

So we start coming up with, all right, how do we get past winners to recount

how they allegedly won these pieces?

I said, look.

We can do this.

Why don't we bring all these past winners to Vegas? I just did Vegas.

I said.

I don't know why I picked Vegas. Probably because it's the fun meter

which is the immediate no, you know.

But I said, hey, hear me out.

Let's do a reunion of all these past winners.

Let's bring all these people together. Tell us.

Because we didn't know their stories. Tell us.

how they won these and what they did with it, that kind of thing. Because,

know, McDonald's has big pockets. They get some all -expenses -paid trips to

Vegas, balloons falling in the confetti, and they love that shit.

And, you know, the questions were, Matthews, where are you going to do

Embassy Suites.

Take the whole floor, rope everything off, right? Just in case stupid shows up

and you have them all lined up in these rooms and just arrest them all at the

same time, right?

Great thing.

No.

No way in hell.

No, Doug.

How much is that going to cost us?

We did have some budgets to deal with. I can't remember what it was. It was

like, get him out of here, whatever it was.

I can't believe you said that.

Doug is one of the hardest working agents I've ever met in my life.

Very creative.

He'll do anything. He'll try anything.

And he can talk forever.

He is relentless.

This idea of, quote -unquote, hosting a reunion of past winners in Las Vegas

seemed so outlandish up front. And then we realized, wait a minute, if you're

not going to follow through with it, you can promise some pretty elaborate

things. Everybody likes to go to Vegas. So in preparation for that wonderful

conference that we were going to have, all expense paid.

We could contact these winners, go out and film them to capture their so

story, and then the carrot was you get this trip to Vegas.

Rick was freaked out about it, but I wasn't. Remember, I'm the guy that's

I know this is going to work because I know it is, right? It's all shamrock,

baby, shamrock.

I was the direct contact with the winners, so I could legitimize all of

information.

It was all recorded, and, you know, it was 17 years ago, so it was a big tape

recorder that I carried around in a black McDonald's briefcase. I even

it to my friend's wedding in Jackson Hole because, you know, I had to be able

tape the calls whenever they came. If, like, I had to flip the tape, I'd be

like, can I put you on hold for a second? You know, and then I'd flip the

and then put them back on.

Amy would call him up.

and say, hey, look, we're putting together this media release of previous

winners, how they won it, what they did with it, some of their story that hasn't

been really told.

We'll come to you, or you can come to us, wherever we were going to do it,

whatever hotel that you want.

Nobody said no to that.

Most everybody was like, tell me when we're going to Vegas.

Obviously, we were not going to do a reunion, but to the winners, we told

we're planning this big reunion, and we started to get them actually excited to

be going to Las Vegas.

That was kind of fundamental that it was a bit of a ruse. We didn't make

reservations in Las Vegas.

I think the pitch was, you know, we're going to put your story up on the big

screen and, you know, over a dinner and everybody's going to clap. And are you

interested in the reunion of winners? And of course they are.

Well, locking them into a story on camera takes a B minus case and makes

know, an A plus case.

My name is Doug Astrologa. I'm an FBI agent, and I was the lighting guy for

Shamrock production in the McDonald's case.

Oh, so this is a little, yeah, I remember this.

Doug Astrologa was a relatively young agent, you know, real,

real enthusiastic, charismatic guy. When I came out of Quantico, I wanted to do

something exciting.

Originally, I had stuck him with the admin agent on this Title III, which is,

all the jobs, probably the most thankless. I mean, it really is a brutal

but there's a reward process that happens.

So in Doug's case, we let him work on the undercover with Doug Matthews, the

quote -unquote lighting guy.

I had no idea what I was doing. I was just using this light meter and pressing

something on this going, it's great.

I still have no idea how to use one of these, actually. But I do believe we

more lighting over here.

Really, the point was to engage them in conversations.

That had to reconcile with what they had originally stated for McDonald's to win

the prize.

We recorded these interviews with them so the FBI could then match the

match the facts, what they originally told McDonald's, what they're telling us

on camera.

what the FBI sort of already knew.

So that once we had the evidence showing that, you know you didn't win this

legitimately, you've lied to the FBI, and here's the evidence to prove it,

would be more willing to cooperate.

Can you explain the difference between the Chapman and what the FBI did?

The FBI was merely, when the FBI took a film crew to a winner,

that winner...

had already contacted Simon Marketing, hence McDonald's, claiming to have been

winner. They're already saying, I did this, and this is how I obtained

this game piece.

An individual could never claim that's entrapment because...

They did it before the law enforcement was involved.

Entrapment is to have law enforcement put the idea into the person's head and

get them to do something they otherwise wouldn't have done.

We weren't saying, say this, say that, and say that. We were saying, how, what,

where, who.

Those are just opportunities for him to fill in the blanks.

and tell us what he wants to tell.

Remember, just keep looking at me. And if you mess up or you feel like you want

to say it again, we can start all over again.

I hand gesture sometimes it gets in there, so I'll make sure I don't do

Okay, why don't we go back to that day that you won in New Hampshire, and can

you just sort of describe the day for us, what you were doing in the morning

at work and then? It was a summer day.

I wasn't working. It was Sunday, as a matter of fact.

And there wasn't a whole lot of work to do. So, you know, browsing through

the Sunday paper, as I am wont to do.

He was fumbling through it, trying to figure out how he won that particular

piece. In reality, a life experience like that is...

drilled into your memory forever and ever. Nobody wins a million dollars on a

regular basis.

I found the insert and I

found the little tear -off tab and I

got cold, very cold.

He was sweating so bad.

Like, I know at some point Amy

even said to me, every time you ask him a question, it's like I've got to get

the towel to dot his head.

It was pouring out because he was lying about everything.

Well, suffice it to say, I just got cold all over.

And then did you go to the McDonald's to say that you had won, or how did it

work? No, first, I wasn't so sure about it.

I went to a lawyer.

I did. You know, you need to protect yourself.

Do you remember who that was?

No, I don't.

Was the lawyer in Litchfield?

No, it was over in... You

could zoom in, because we did, zoom in on his forehead, and you could just see

the sweat.

You want to take a little sip of water?

Yes.

I'm kind of paying attention to that a little bit. I'm leaking.

You know, and I'd say stuff like, hey, so nobody, like, called you up and said,

hey, we need you to be a winner or whatever. And he'd go, God, no, I'd

that. And it just pours. The sweat would pour.

I went to a lawyer, and he advised me to, at all costs,

Protect my identity.

It just seemed odd to me that many of the people I talked to did not want to

come forward, and they seemed to have knowledge about what their legal rights

were about being anonymous or not.

Who is Buddy Fisher?

Buddy Fisher was the father of Robin Colombo, who was married

to Jerry Colombo.

I'll never forget it. I was upstairs in my bedroom, and my father called me.

And there wasn't many words exchanged. He just said, I want the big one. So I

knew what it meant.

He did get one of the million -dollar tickets, and he had never broken

a law in his entire life.

One stipulation that my grandfather made, he says, okay, if I get this

I'm not doing a commercial, but I remember we would be getting phone

and they would talk to my grandfather and say, hey, we're trying to get all of

the Monopoly winners together for some kind of reunion or something like that.

want to say it was Vegas, so he didn't make that trip.

Now, had your wife or anyone in your whole family ever won anything like that

before? No.

Never? Nothing.

So this was big.

Huge.

So you're the luckiest one in your family, huh?

Yes. Yes. So have any of your kids or grandkids played Monopoly or tried to

or anything like that? Yes, and we still do. Oh, good. And we still do, yes.

Have any of them won any cars?

No.

I think I won a cheeseburger.

Would it surprise you to know that she actually did do an interview to possibly

use at that reunion?

You said he did do one? I did not know that.

Oh. Okay, yeah, I did not know that.

Hmm. Okay.

Wow.

Is that around?

You know, the greed was crazy here, which is great for us.

One night, Jerry and I were out with our wives to dinner, and we went to the

men's room together. That sounds horrible, but we went to the men's room

together, and Jerry gave me a million -dollar ticket.

And I told him, I don't want to be involved. I really don't. I had not

anything but a $25 ,000 ticket.

I told him I didn't need the million dollars.

I told him I was out of it. I said, Jerry, you know what? I don't know what

did with these guys, how much you made or anything else.

There's a time and there's a place.

Stop and everything else.

He said, well, just do something with the ticket.

So I took the ticket and I flushed it down the toilet.

And what was his reaction when you flushed it down the toilet in front of

None. Zero.

He didn't have any reaction to you flushing a million dollars down the

I didn't either. How's that?

Yeah, how's that? I didn't either. No.

I knew I was doing the right thing.

And Jerry had told me it was over and that was it.

I'm telling you, the night I flushed that ticket down the toilet, I thought

was over.

I thought it was over.

I swear to you, on everything holy, I thought it was over.

If I even suspected he was taking tickets, I would have told on him in a

heartbeat. And he knew it. I think that's why I didn't know it. I bet

I didn't get a ticket.

After Jerry got sick with this John Bray syndrome, there was something different

in him.

Even though he was well on the road to mending, he could have repercussions

later on being crippled or bedridden or dead.

So he had nothing to lose at that point.

My husband, Jerry, we got a lot of my family members involved.

And that isn't all.

My family members that won, that was just a little piece of the pie.

You had Al Capone with the prohibition.

You had Mike Frente with the gas.

And then now you have this, the Monopoly.

That's really the highest three money makers of the mob so far.

My husband picked the winners. He had tickets.

He flew everywhere.

I think Uncle Jerry even may have got a little jealous.

So can you spell that out? Because Jerry, Jerry, it's kind of... Uncle

Jerome Jacobson.

And Jerry is my husband, Jerry Colombo.

Jacobson became Uncle Jerry because that's an Italian thing.

My husband gave him up out of respect.

If your general opinion of mankind is running kind of low this holiday season,

here's a story that might make you feel much, much better about the human race.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis has received a very unusual

gift.

Do you remember who gave that funny piece away? The St. Jude Children's

Hospital? Yeah.

That's Uncle Jerry.

Hospital officials are calling this a gift from an angel in the true spirit of

the season.

This is a happy day. Woo -hoo!

If you're out there and you hear me, we love you.

My brother took this little small operation and made it huge.

Literally, it was a monopoly of scams.

The winners, they would just lie, lie, lie.

We keep pushing. You never know when you're going to hit a wall.

There was things that nobody knew, and I just kept it all to myself.

I thought, I'm never going to get out of this.

I was out of panic.

I had no other option but to take this process through.

The money got too big.

With that comes the price.